Once a person is addicted, the addiction becomes his top priority, and ordinary life suffers for it. For a gambler, gambling comes before everything. Drugs cost a great deal of money, and some users, trying to raise that money, end up dealing: they need money to use, so eventually they sell. That is how a vicious circle forms.
At this point a question usually comes up: is addiction a sin or an illness? It can be seen as both. But here I want to set that question aside and look at the mind of the person who becomes addicted without passing a verdict on him either way. The point is simply to see why a person becomes addicted, since not everyone does.
Addiction comes in many kinds. In Korea, the government names four major addictions: alcohol, drugs, gambling and gaming. Sex addiction is also common. There is exercise addiction too, and even book addiction, which means reading too much.
Underneath all of them, addiction is basically a way of avoiding reality, of running away from it. Why run? Because living in reality is painful. Facing it is too hard, so the person throws himself into one thing. Book addiction sounds like the harmless kind, but someone addicted to books reads so much that he can no longer manage daily life. People sometimes ask whether some addictions are good ones. There are no good addictions. In the end, every addiction is self-destructive: people addicted to exercise keep working out even after their knees are ruined.
“Because it’s fun,” or “I just do it”
Whatever a person gets hooked on — drink, drugs, a game — it starts out good, fun and comfortable. Take gaming. To an adult’s eye, every child looks like a gaming addict. If you have children at home, you have probably heard yourself say it: “He plays far too much. He’s addicted to that game.”
Is it a serious gaming addiction, or does the child simply like games and play a lot? You can get a rough answer by asking. Ask your child, or any young person you think plays a lot, why he plays. If the answer is “Because it’s fun,” he is not an addict. If it is “I just do it,” you can take that as a sign of addiction.
Why does that answer point to addiction? Because the deeper his gaming addiction goes, the less his playing comes from wanting to play. He keeps at it because the game gives him some peace of mind, not because it is fun.
Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt
Now take alcohol. Drink, and the body’s senses go numb. Take a blow while drunk and it doesn’t hurt, because the drink has deadened the feeling.
Gaming numbs the senses too. Once you are in a game, you lose track of time. Every few years there is a news story about someone who kept gaming until he died of malnutrition. The body is supposed to tell a person when he is hungry. But gaming had numbed that sense in him, so even as his body ran out of nourishment, he never felt hungry.
Self-destruction in the mind, numbness in the body
So, psychologically, addiction pushes the person toward self-destruction, toward wrecking his own life. Physically, it numbs the person’s own senses, and that numbing is no accident: it is part of what he is after.
For pain in the body we take a painkiller
When something hurts in the body, what do we take? A painkiller. If you have a cold, or an ache somewhere, you take a painkiller and the pain settles down. For pain in the body, we have painkillers.
Then what is there for pain in the mind?
Some people answer that they pray. And that is right: people of faith pray, and in prayer they find comfort and strength from God.
But look squarely at what actually happens. Christians, people who believe in Jesus, still get depression. There are many addicts among them, and many people with serious anger problems. Every one of these is a sign of pain in the mind.
So why do these people, who believe in Jesus and believe in God, not get comfort and consolation and strength from God? This is the hard question, and it deserves serious thought. As at the start, the aim is not to judge anyone but to see what is happening. When a person can bring the pain in his mind to God and be comforted, he does not become addicted. But when that does not happen, and his mind is still hurting badly, he picks some other way to soothe it.
Looking for rescue outside yourself
You feel low, so you go out and start shopping. Keep doing that, and in time you become a shopping addict. Look closely, and addiction is the act of looking outside for the rescue that would settle the pain inside. The pain is in the mind, but the answer is sought outside. The same goes for the drink you pour because your child is giving you grief: you are angry and hurt, and the drink is there to soothe that.
Tense all the time, without knowing it
You may have heard of propofol, the anaesthetic used to put patients to sleep for surgery, which some people become addicted to. Whatever a person gets hooked on has some painkilling effect, and drugs like propofol in particular make the body relax.
And the people who are going to become addicts are tense all the time. Their shoulders are always tight. The tension is so constant that they don’t even know they are tense; that is simply how they live every ordinary day. Then comes a drink, or a drug, or some activity such as gaming or shopping, and the tension eases. “Ah, that’s better. Ah, I’m all right. Something about this gives me peace.” Once a person starts finding comfort for his troubles this way, he does it again and again, and as it gets worse, he becomes an addict.
For pain in the body there is a painkiller. For pain in the mind, what is there? That question stays open for now. But there is one question you can ask yourself first, about whatever you keep going back to: Am I doing this because it’s fun, or do I just do it?
Related
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- All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode
- The Self-Prescription: What You’ve Been Taking Every Day
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board